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Michael Foot Dies at 96; Led Britain’s Labour Party

Michael Foot, who led the British Labour Party in the early 1980s, and, after failing to broker a peace between its left and right wings, presided over its crushing defeat at the hands of Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 general election, died Wednesday at his home in Hampstead, north London. He was 96.

His death was announced Wednesday on the floor of the House of Commons by Jack Straw, the justice secretary.

“Michael Foot was a genuine British radical,” Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, said in a lengthy tribute released Wednesday. “He possessed a powerful sense of community, a pride in our progressive past and faith in our country’s potential for a radical future.”

Mr. Foot, a Socialist and a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was elected Labour’s leader in 1980, defeating the right-wing Labourite Denis Healey by presenting himself as the sole candidate capable of unifying the party.

It was a particularly inauspicious moment for the party. James Callaghan, his predecessor, had been soundly defeated in the 1979 general election by Lady Thatcher after the notorious “winter of discontent.” Widespread strikes, interrupted public services and rising inflation and unemployment had inspired the succinct and effective Conservative message, emblazoned on its campaign posters: “Labour Isn’t Working.”

Mr. Foot, a bookish, old-school Labourite, already 67 when he took office, proved unable to counter the perception of Labour as an obstacle to progress, hopelessly wedded to outmoded ideas and practices, or to quell a left-wing insurgency, led by Tony Benn, which demanded unilateral nuclear disarmament, further nationalization of industry and withdrawal from the European Economic Community.

On being elected, Mr. Foot announced his intention to unite Labour “on the matters of supreme importance to us — economic policy, domestic policy — and to attack the outrages and infamies which this government is inflicting on our people.” He then quoted his mentor, the left-wing Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s National Health Service: “Never underestimate the passion for unity in the party, and never forget that it is the decent instinct of people who want to do something.”

Unity never arrived. The party’s left wing engineered a change in the governing rules to give the trade unions and local party organizations a determining voice in choosing the party’s leader. In response, moderate Labourites led by Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and William Rodgers — the Gang of Four — split from the party to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981. Two dozen Labour members of Parliament followed.

With his unruly white mane, thick glasses and scruffy jackets, Mr. Foot looked like a regular at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, but he was a compelling orator revered as the conscience of the Labour Party, the custodian of its traditional Socialist goals.

In the 1983 general election, he campaigned on a Labour platform that included unilateral disarmament, higher taxes, a more interventionist industrial policy, nationalization of the banks and abolition of the House of Lords.

Photo

Michael Foot in 1982 with Tony Blair, who went on to become prime minister of Britain. Mr. Foot led Labour in the early '80s.Credit
Press Association, via Associated Press

“We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress,” he declared in a campaign speech. “No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer, ‘To hell with them.’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.”

The Labour manifesto, 700 pages long, was described by the right-wing Labour politician Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history.” Lady Thatcher, buoyed by victory in the Falklands War, dealt Labour a humiliating defeat. Mr. Foot resigned as party leader and was succeeded by Neil Kinnock.

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Michael Mackintosh Foot was born on July 23, 1913, in Plymouth. His father, Isaac Foot, was a solicitor, Methodist lay preacher and Liberal Party politician. After attending Leighton Park, the prestigious Quaker boarding school, he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Wadham College, Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford Union and graduated in 1934.

After embracing socialism, he joined the Labour Party and ran for Parliament in the 1935 general election, speaking out forcefully for disarmament. Rejected by the voters, he took up journalism, writing for The New Statesman and Tribune, the left-wing weekly founded by Mr. Bevan, before going to work for Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard. In 1940, under the pseudonym Cato, he and two colleagues wrote “Guilty Men,” a furious attack on the appeasement policy of the Chamberlain government.

Asthma kept him out of the army, and in 1945 he won a seat in Parliament representing Devonport, a seat he held until 1955. In 1949 he married Jill Craigie, a writer and documentary filmmaker, who died in 1999.

He returned to Parliament in 1960 as the member for Ebbw Vale, in Monmouthshire, a seat left vacant by the death of Mr. Bevan. During this period he served two stints as editor of Tribune, which adopted a leftist but anti-Communist line as the cold war developed.

Mr. Foot led the left-wing opposition to Harold Wilson but in 1974 joined the government as secretary of state for employment.

When Wilson retired in 1976, Mr. Foot became deputy leader of the party and leader of the House of Commons. “I have been on the left of the party since I joined it in about 1934, and I have not seen much reason for altering,” he said in 1976.

After the disastrous 1983 election, he returned to the back benches and retired in 1992.

As much a man of letters as a politician — The Times of London once described his writing as “neat, economical and muscular” — he wrote many books, including a two-volume biography of Mr. Bevan, “Another Heart and Other Pulses: The Alternative to the Thatcher Society” (1984), “The Politics of Paradise: A Vindication of Byron” (1988) and “H.G.: The History of Mr. Wells” (1995).

“He knew — as I knew, which is why I counseled him against doing it — that he was letting himself into purgatory in becoming leader of the Labour Party in its darkest, grimmest hour,” Mr. Kinnock said Wednesday. “But if he hadn’t done it, I don’t think Labour would have survived as a political force.”

Correction: March 5, 2010

An obituary on Thursday about Michael Foot, who led the British Labour Party in the early 1980s, misstated part of the name of an organization he helped found. It is the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, not the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament.

A version of this article appears in print on March 4, 2010, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Michael Foot Dies at 96; Led Britain’s Labour Party. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe